Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
tweet.

What's fuelling the food-bank frenzy? The hunger for publicity of anti-poverty activists

Something about the food-bank frenzy doesn't add up. Reading the Dickens-tinged coverage of food banks, of which there are now 400, you could be forgiven for thinking that Britain has done a timewarp back to the Victorian era of emaciated urchins begging for scraps of bread on foggy bridges. Britons are "hungrier than ever", says the Independent. "Starving Britain", says one newspaper headline. There is clearly enormous "destitution, hardship and hunger" in Britain, says Oxfam. Even the International Red Cross has got involved, promising to help tackle Britain's "food poverty". What next – a charity single along the lines of "Do They Know It's Christmas?", only aimed at getting emergency food to allegedly starving Brits rather than actually starving Africans?

Here’s something about the rise of food banks and the hand-wringing over "Starving Britain" that doesn't make sense. For the past five years we've been told that Britain, especially the poor bits, is suffering from an obesity epidemic. Our children, especially the "white trash" ones, as Jamie Oliver called them, are gorging themselves into an early grave on turkey twizzlers, campaigners claimed. The Guardian, which has been at the forefront of publishing tear-stained articles about the food bank-using masses, has a whole section of its website devoted to "The obesity crisis", where you can read articles about the "fat capital of Britain" (Tamworth in the Midlands) and the need for an obesity tsar to address the "massive and multi-factor problem” of corpulent Blighty. Those articles were published this year, five years into the recession, and they’re illustrated with photos of usually poor fat people. I wish the moralistic pitiers of the less well-off would make up their minds – are the poor dangerously fat or dangerously underfed?

Here’s another thing about the food-bank stuff that feels weird. For years we’ve been told that the problem in Britain is that food is too cheap. That’s not something I’ve ever gone along with – the cheaper the better, in my view – but it has certainly been a concern of the very same class of people now claiming that hundreds of thousands of Brits cannot afford food. Campaigners complained about “the high price of cheap food”, claiming that the abundance of low-priced foodstuffs was “potentially catastrophic” in terms of its impact on “the environment and public health”. Britons are “hooked on cheap food”, commentators have said in recent years – often in the same newspapers that now insist that massive numbers of people cannot afford so much as a Tesco value tin of baked beans (25p).

And it’s true that food is extremely cheap compared with past eras. There has been a hike in food prices over the past two years, yes, but we’re still spending far less of our cash on grub. In the late 1950s, 33 per cent of household expenditure went on food; in more recent times it has been 15 per cent, creeping up to 16.6 per cent since the recession kicked in. Given that food is cheaper than it was for earlier generations, and that the welfare state provides money to more people today than it did in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the opening of so many food banks doesn’t really make sense. Why were there no food banks in the recessionary period of the early 1970s, for example, when things were harder and stuff was more expensive?

Here’s my theory, for what it’s worth. Today’s food banks are not fuelled by the needs of the poor so much as by the needs of charities and campaigners. I think the main beneficiaries of the fashion for opening food banks, and for press-releasing these openings to every media outlet in the land, are the poverty industry rather than the poor. The poverty industry is made up of those campaigners who depend, for their very existence, on the idea that there exist hordes of helpless, hapless poor folk – and so the more these campaigners can fuel that idea, the better. Just consider how loose is their definition of poverty. They define “food poverty” as “the inability to afford, or have access to, food to make up a healthy diet”. But who defines what is a healthy diet? If a family can afford unhealthy foods – like cheap white bread, processed meat, beans – can they still be said to be suffering from “food poverty”? In these campaigners’ eyes, yes. Using various modern and ridiculously stretched definitions of poverty, the Trussell Trust, which runs most of Britain’s food banks, says 13 million people in Britain are living in poverty. They mean relative poverty – effectively “not being as wealthy as others” rather than “having nothing”. For them, the important thing is not having a serious debate about living standards in the 21st century but rather promoting the Dickensian idea that millions of people are poor, desperate and starving.

That is what is driving the food-bank frenzy – not Britons’ desperation for food, but poverty campaigners’ desperation for publicity. The opening of a food bank is ultimately a very fancy press release about the need to keep the charity sector and welfare state flourishing. It’s politics dolled up as emergency aid. It’s poverty porn, providing a kick for those activists and commentators who like nothing more than to feel the thrill of pity for the less fortunate.